Umami

  After that I eat a banana or an egg, depending on supplies. I dress The Girls, and all three of us sit in the study, me in front of Nina Simone. Then I spend the morning writing intensively, making sure not to consult any sources other than my heart and my head. I take a break at midday to have a drink in the Mustard Mug, and raise a toast with Linda. Then I grab something to eat from one of the three stands along my block (because I’ve realized cooking for one is about as much fun as poking yourself in the eye with a stick). I’ve been plodding along like this for three weeks. I write intensively but also delete a lot because I want to do it properly: if I can’t tell everything in order, I want at least to get out the important stuff.

  A couple of days ago I gave the document a title page. In big letters, in the middle of the page, I wrote, Noelia. Then I added her surnames, and then I deleted them again. Her name isn’t big enough for her. I wrote, Umami. It’s a bit of a daft title because I’ve already written a book with that name, one that contains purely food-anthropological theory. But for now I think I’ll leave it like that, because, at the same time, Umami is the perfect title. Trying to explain who my wife was is just as necessary and impossible as explaining umami: that flavor that floods your taste buds without you being able to quite put your finger on it. Complex and at the same time clean and round, just like Noelia was: as distinguishable as she was unpredictable. Umami is the perfect title because nobody would understand it, just as I never fully understood Noelia Vargas Vargas. Maybe that’s why I never got bored of her. Maybe that’s all love is. Maybe that’s all writing is: an attempt to put someone in words, even when you know full well that that person is a kaleidoscope: their thousand reflections in the eye of a fly.

  From time to time I read some of my passages out loud. They tend to be as rhetorical and inadequate as the one I’ve just written, and on the whole I delete them. You might think that if I’m reading parts out loud it’s for The Girls’ benefit, but I’ve not entirely lost the plot. Not yet. I’m quite aware that if I die it won’t be The Girls who raise the alarm.

  By the way, in case I do die, I’d like to leave something in writing:

  To whoever finds me and has to go to the trouble of throwing me out with the trash:

  THANKS, buddy!

  And also: I hereby hand you custody of The Girls.

  They are to be cleaned with a damp cloth.

  Do not, under any circumstances, submerge them in water.

  Cheers!

  *

  An anecdote came to mind when I wrote ‘AKA’ a few pages back. Back in the eighties, I was invited by the Complutense de Madrid (which wasn’t as bad then as it is now, but worse) to give a course on pre-Hispanic diets, creole gastronomic fusion, milpas: all those things I can teach with my eyes closed. I slipped a selection of dry, multicolor corncobs through customs to spark the students’ interest and stayed in Madrid for one complete semester, during which, for the first and last time in our lives together, Noelia and I wrote each other letters. Noelia kept all of mine, and one day last year, when she was already very ill, she asked me to read them to her. At some point I read out a passage where I’d used the word ‘knockout’.

  ‘What?’ said Noelia.

  ‘Knockout,’ I said slowly, trying to improve my lousy English pronunciation.

  ‘Yes, I heard you, but I don’t know what that is. Like in boxing?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Let’s see, bring it here.’

  I pointed to the sentence in the letter, and she immediately burst into a fit of giggles; so intense that I caught them too. We laughed until we cried. We hadn’t laughed like that since before we found out about her cancer, perhaps even earlier. When at last we got a hold of ourselves, I asked her what it had all been about. It turned out that throughout our entire marriage, every time I had used the acronym KO, she had read OK.

  ‘I remember this, it was hilarious.’

  ‘But couldn’t you see it was exactly the reverse of OK?’

  ‘I thought it was your dyslexia.’

  ‘What dyslexia?’

  ‘I don’t know, yours. I always thought it was your own very particular brand of dyslexia.’

  ‘You never brought it up!’

  ‘Well, that makes us even.’

  ‘Even how?’

  ‘Even because you never mentioned that my miserable morning stars cheered you up!’

  *

  I gave Marina the Joaquín Sorolla book today. I think it would have made Noelia happy. Or maybe not, because it was her favorite, but she definitely would have agreed that if having it around depresses me, better to pass it on to the aspiring painter.

  While I was teaching in Madrid, Noelia came and spent two weeks with me and became obsessed with the Sorolla Museum, mainly because it was right next to the house and had a cool yard where you could sit and read under a tree. It didn’t have a café, which meant there weren’t any waiters: Noelia didn’t rub along with Madrid’s waiters. Some afternoons we’d go together to see the Sorollas. Art wasn’t her thing on the whole, but after a few glasses of wine and some tapas, boy, did she get into her painting. On the weekends, which is to say, on the days when we would head out for an aperitif, Noelia would refuse to wear her glasses; a vain habit which also meant she only saw blurry versions of Sorolla’s oils. Where others would stand back and appreciate a vast landscape from afar, she’d have to get right up close, and saw nothing but brushstrokes. The clumsy chaos of oil paint smudged on canvas with a spatula; the distorted, screwball delight that were Sorolla’s dabs up close convinced Noelia that she was admiring an abstract painter. Before we went back to Mexico I got her the exhibition catalog. She flicked through it with her surgical glasses on and was utterly taken aback, a little disappointed even. But later she grew fond of Sorolla, and the catalogue was always lying around somewhere in the living room.

  Along with the book, I gave Marina a photo of Noelia and commissioned a portrait.

  *

  I’ve got a new, corrosive obsession: regret distilled to its purest form. For thirty years, at the end of each week, Noelia would throw her issue of Astros in the trash. What a damned stupid thing to do! If I had them now, I could chart my wife’s morning moods over our thirty-year period of cohabitation. That would have been a real project. In my insomnia, I even considered hunting down Madame Elisabeta to ask her for the back issues. She must keep a private archive somewhere in her ramshackle apartment on Avenida Revolución, in metal filing cabinets decorated with gold star stickers. But just the thought of Elisabeta possibly also being dead – her and her parakeet – was enough to dissuade me from getting in touch. I’m scared I’ll find out who took over writing Astros. Maybe Pisces is rehashing old issues, or publishing Google Translate versions of some obscure Polish astrology website. That’s why I don’t look into it, you understand. Not because I would have regretted hearing that Pisces had been left on her own. Quite the opposite. Lately, despite myself, seeing other people widowed only makes me want to say, ‘Come on then, let’s see how you like it.’

  ‌

  ‌2001

  I’m all alone except for Cleo and the trees. But the trees don’t count because they’re too tall and they don’t talk to me. Cleo is black with some brown, and she’s furry, and she’s the oldest of all Emma’s dogs. I scratch her belly until her ziplings call her from somewhere and she goes racing to them. I don’t have any dogs. Not here, and not in Mexico. Olmo and I are always asking for one, but Theo is allergic and Ana wants a cat. Even if I don’t have any dogs I still know that dogs talk to each other, and I still know that if something is more or less the same size as you and it lives in the same house as you, then that thing is your zipling. Cleo lives with her ziplings and with Emma. Emma’s house smells of chimney and dog and sometimes of wet dog. She has big fat rugs on the floor with weird drawings on them that make you dizzy if you stare at them, and she has wooden masks on the walls. Everything makes you feel like it’s Christmas. Apart from the mask
s. The masks make you feel like it’s Halloween.

  Cleo runs off, forgets all about me and doesn’t come back. Now I can see chestnuts everywhere and chanterelle nowhere. The chanterelles are hiding and I am sick of looking for them. I want to go back to the house but I don’t know which way it is. I think maybe down, because we’ve been walking up and up and up. I follow Cleo’s footprints in the mud until I reach a part that’s very dry with no mushrooms and no footprints. I’m cold. I roll down the sleeves of my wooly dead pilot sweater. Where is everyone? The grove looks like an enchanted forest. I dare myself to close my eyes, but then I get scared and open them again. I try again with my back against a tree because maybe that’s easier. I have to get at least to ten. And I have to count the numbers properly like how Pina showed me yesterday when we were breathing under water with the straw.

  ‘One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four…’ I get scared and open my eyes again.

  My brothers are always saying I’m a scaredy-cat, but it’s not true. Only when I get scared is it a little bit true.

  There are trees all around and their shadows are bigger. I feel like maybe now they might talk to me but that they won’t say nice things. I get scared for real and start to walk as fast as I can without hurting my feet. I spot the house but it’s so far I can cover it with my hand in front of me. The forest starts to talk and I have to run, even without shoes on, and though my feet are like a pair of mud cakes. I trip, get up again and start to cry a little, but I keep running and I keep running and crying and then suddenly there’s no more shade and no more chestnuts and no more downhill. I run on the flat ground until I’m in the garden and it’s sunny, and I’m almost saved, and I see everybody and I run really fast to where they are and when I get there no one pays me any attention.

  They’re all standing around the biggest of the new ponds. Emma is smoking one of those cigarettes she makes herself and I think she’s giving a class because she’s doing her teaching move, which is when she waves her hands around a lot. Ana and Pina are looking at her, ignoring me. Mama puts her hand on my head and plays it like a piano; sometimes I like it and sometimes I sit it (even though Dad says you can’t sit something, no matter how much you can’t stand it). I don’t care if they ignore me anymore because now I want to follow the class, which is on how the new ponds work. I’m going to understand it better than Ana and explain it all to Dad when he’s back from the island.

  Emma says this pond is part of a system of ponds that filter all the sewage until it’s clean. Mama sees my face scrunch up and explains to me that sewage is what in Mexico we call black water and white water. Black water has all the poop in it. White water has all the soap in it. Clean water doesn’t have anything in it and it’s just called water.

  I ask Emma how the pond gets all the poop out and she says with pebbles and gravel. I really don’t get this. I can feel my face scrunching up again. Sometimes I have a question but I don’t know what it is and my face scrunches up like a rabbit’s. Emma takes me by the hand and leads me up to where the ponds start. She has a really weird hand that feels super soft on the back but all rough on the palm. Rough like the volcanic rock outside the concert hall where I play with my ziplings while our parents rehearse. Sometimes they rehearse for so long Theo says we’ll melt like lava and become part of the volcanic rock.

  Emma shows me around the whole system. The system is really four ponds linked by mini waterfalls like a pond ladder. You can’t see the first one because it’s under the house. You can just about see the bit where the water comes out into the second one, and then between the second one and the third one there’s another wall-step thing made of gravel and stones and plants. There are lilies in the third pond and carps in the fourth. They’re not big carps, as carps go. Not like the ones I saw that time in a park which were like a hundred years old and had mustaches.

  Emma’s done teaching, she’s done with her cigarette and now she wants to find a hose to clean me up because she doesn’t like it when I’m brown and lie with the dogs on her fat carpets. I take off my sweater and my bathing suit and she hoses me down like I’m a plant in the garden. A brown puddle appears under me. The hard mud on my knees goes watery and dark and it runs down my legs like a dirty fruit juice, as if you could drink from me. I go back to being me-colored, and by the end I only have mud under my toenails and my fingernails, and by the very end Grandma says to me:

  ‘That’s better, now.’

  But she’s wrong, because without my mud I can’t camuflash at all.

  ‌

  ‌2000

  There are a few kids in the water. Some adults too, but they don’t count. Girls sit around in bunches, like talking grapes. Pina scurries past them. She hates that Ana has gone. She walks around the pool, then walks around it again. A girl she recognizes from another weekend at the hotel waves her over.

  ‘Maybe today we’re friends,’ Pina thinks.

  The girl is wearing a bikini and has a braid that runs from her left ear right across her forehead like a tiara to her right ear, then flows down to her shoulders where it’s tied with a white ribbon. Pina is pretty sure her mom wouldn’t have the first clue how to put together something like that. She goes over, and the girl tells the others, ‘This is Pina.’

  Pina is just raising her hand to wave a group hello when the girl with the braid breaks into song, ‘Pina the wiener, she’s a Filipina! Pina the wiener, not even Latina!’

  The shrieks from the three girls remind Pina of her alarm clock on school mornings. Wrapping her arms around herself, she walks away from the swimming pool, burning her feet on the hot flagstones. Pina grits her teeth; she will not cry. Her grandma wouldn’t like it if she did. And anyway, her grandma’s not even from the Philippines.

  ‘Don’t go,’ shouts one of the girls.

  But Pina has already snuck behind a bungalow. In another one just like it, her parents are having one of their fights.

  She makes her way to the end of the hotel, walking behind the rooms, sidestepping stones, ants and cigarette butts. Behind each bungalow there’s a clothesline stretching between the iron bars on the windows and the parking-lot railing. She slips underneath them. Most of the clotheslines are empty, but when they do have things on them, Pina walks without ducking and the fabrics brush over her face, and for a second it’s like she’s Isadora Duncan, who’s always wrapped up in fabrics, at least in the photos Pina’s mom has on a wall at home.

  Close to the parking-lot entrance, Pina comes across a few bushes pruned into different shapes: one is shaped like a chicken and the rest like spheres, or perhaps eggs. Some of the eggs are bigger than the chicken. Behind the bushes there’s a cast-iron bench. She sits down. It’s scorching hot but she wills herself not to move. The bench has a parking-lot view. There’s nobody there but the cars. Nobody’s cars. She counts them so she doesn’t have to think about the bench burning her legs. There are fourteen. Heat waves rise off the tarmac under the car tires, and if she stares without blinking, it looks like the parking lot is slow dancing.

  Pina realizes she’s still holding the banana her dad gave her before hustling her out of the room so she didn’t see the fight. She’d forgotten all about it and now it’s brown where she’s been squeezing it. She sees a security hut close by with one of those windows that looks like a mirror and wonders if there’s anyone inside. Slowly, she peels her banana. She must do everything slowly today, so that the sun goes away, then the moon, and then they go back to the mews and she can tell Ana all about the braid girl and the fight. Days without Ana are like the TV on mute.

  The other day, Víctor, Ana’s dad, told them that it’s not true that the mute button changes the sound to a frequency that only mutants can hear. But when he left the room, Theo went on insisting it was true and that Víctor would never admit as much because then he’d be left with a bunch of freaked-out kids wetting the bed each night. Theo also explained to them that this year, the year 2000, is called The Year Zero Zero, and we’ll coun
t the next years like this: Zero One, Zero Two, Zero Three. They’re not going to put the twenty at the start anymore, because it just takes up space.

  ‘It’s gonna be like when Mexico took three zeros off the peso, and one million became one thousand and they called them new pesos. But you don’t remember because you girls were just babies then.’

  ‘And you weren’t even born!’ said Ana.

  ‘Exactly. I’m part of the new-pesos generation and so, unlike you, birdbrain, I know how to count the new years.’

  ‘And when we get to ten,’ ask Pina, ‘will it be Zero Ten?’

  ‘Excellent question, Pi!’ said Theo, turning his back on Ana. ‘It’ll go like this: Ten, Eleven, Twelve, just like that, without the zero. I’ll turn twenty in the Year Thirteen, which is good luck.’

  Pina wasn’t altogether convinced. And then Ana swore to her that Theo had made the whole thing up and the years were going to be called Twothousand, Twothousandandone, Twothousandandtwo, Twothousandandthree, like you count the seconds, but obviously not so fast. She might be right. But Pina does believe the other thing, the mutant thing, or at least she kind of believes it, because when you press mute on the TV, it doesn’t go totally quiet, not like when you turn it off properly. There’s a sound that isn’t exactly a sound but isn’t silence either. Maybe it’s true that the TV’s transmitting something for someone far away.

  Pina is nibbling on her brown banana with her front teeth, like a rabbit in slow motion, when she sees the bushes move. Two girls and a boy emerge from behind them. Since they weren’t expecting to find her there, they’re not sure whether to sit down or not. The boy ignores her, but one of the girls shoos her with her hand, like you shoo a dog. Pina shuffles down a bit toward the edge of the bench. She concentrates on her banana, to show she’s minding her own business. She examines the imprint her two front teeth have made on the fruit’s flesh, and the space left intact between them.